Home Waters
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Home for the doctor appointment.
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No work this morning.
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I believe my kidneys are getting better.
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Somehow I know it.
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Belief and boojum are hard to separate.
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Lab numbers are confirming
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what I desperately want to believe,
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must surely believe, need to know.
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Messages I send in glass tubes and specimen cups
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come back to me on printed forms with numbers and pie charts,
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telling me that I am not crumbling away.
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The Bad River carries the blood of tamarack swamps.
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Out of those waters was I spawned like an eelpout.
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Some day I will go to Freyung,
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to Mauth, to Hinterschmiding, and Zwölfhäuser.
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(Twelve houses and two umlauts. Try to fit that into a poem.)
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I’m told they are nice little towns.
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The town where my Grandmama was born
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is not so far from the Danube, the goddess Danu.
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A wet stink of silt rattles in the reeds.
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Feeds the lichens on stones too old to remember.
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Water knows. She remembers, sees into a wretched unbeliever.
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